Part 27 (1/2)

'I know.'

Ca.s.sandra fell quiet inside Iris's head then, and they absorbed the immensity of the dark and the glistening silence of the night frosts. 'Uh-oh,' came the voice again,'I can sense it again. A presence closing in on us. Something that knows we are here and sharing its wilderness.'

Iris came fully awake. 'Who? Our objective?'

'No - something far bigger. Beneath all this icy crust. Deep under the chilly water. Some ma.s.sive presence.'

'Terrific.What is it?'

'I can't even make out a face. Just a load of vaguely malicious intentions.

The mind I sense is too primitive for me to catch a hold. Its thinking is too fuzzy. But it's underneath us, certain miles under the ice, trying to tune in and find us. It can't, quite, yet.'

Iris shuddered.'Never a dull moment. Are you sure it isn't that spider thing you're picking up?'

'Oh no,' said the Empress Ca.s.sandra. 'She's got a fine mind.

Wonderfully honed. One of those deliciously spiky and odd, spidery minds - just the sort that a spider ought to have. I was out there earlier tonight, talking to the spider and her lover.'

'Her lover? You mean the d.u.c.h.ess? You've been in communion with both of them?'

'Yes, it was rather interesting. The spider has been craving attention for years. The two of them are rather besotted with each other.'

'So I gathered.' ”They're planning to mesh.' Iris swallowed.'What does that mean?'

'They're going to pool their resources. Become one entirely symbiotic creature.You'll see.' Iris squinted into the dark, but couldn't see much.'Well, good luck to them.'Yet she couldn't see the fun in becoming one with your lover in perpetuity. Surely half the fun was in not being doubled - in being two distinct persons, both individual.

'Don't be so humanist,' snapped the earliest Empress. 'Why should spiders and cyborgs think along the same individualist lines as you do?

They can't think of anything better than being one partially cybernetic arachnid. They can't wait to get it together.'

'Stands to reason,' his mused.'Spiders and cyborgs are always wanting to evolve. To transgress, to become the next thing up the evolutionary scale. I suppose it's natural.'

'No it isn't; laughed the Empress. 'It is gloriously unnatural, and that is why they are both in bliss.'

With that, Ca.s.sandra, the oldest Empress of Hyspero, was gone and Iris was alone. She blinked and found that her mind was clear again.

'Doesn't she remind you just a little bit of Mae West?' The Doctor was standing beside the cab of the bus, leaning on her wheelchair. He was wearing one of his more infectious grins.

”That's it,' Iris laughed.'All that sa.s.siness. That's exactly who she's like.

How did you know I was talking to her?'

He shrugged and flopped down into the wheelchair. Outside the wind had picked up, and with a terrifying keen it rattled all the windows.

Iris said, 'She reckons that there's something under the ice. Hunting for us.'

He nodded. ”The Scarlet Empress has given us a comparatively easy time so far. I thought she'd be sending something out to challenge us.

Oh well. I'm sure it's nothing we can't deal with.' He rubbed his palms briskly, though she knew he couldn't really be cold. 'Why don't you go and rest? Everyone else is sleeping.'

'I think I will.'

'How are you holding up?'

'Oh... just about. I'll see this little jaunt through to its end.'

'I hope so, Iris.'

She looked worn, he thought, as she heaved herself out of the driver's seat. Her face was drawn and grey under the preposterous orange plant-pot hat.

'How far do you think we have before we get to the coast?' he asked, burying his concern in practical questions.

'Major Angela says we should get there sometime tomorrow.'

He smiled.'I'm a rotten sailor.'

'You're much more modest this time, you know. I remember a Doctor who claimed to have been instrumental at Trafalgar.'

'Do you?'

Later that night, with dawn starting to s.h.i.+mmer on the furthest corners of the ice field, the Bearded Lady stole out of the bus and went to find the d.u.c.h.ess. She battled through the skirling wind and knew she was taking a ludicrous, foolhardy risk, going blind into the wilderness.

Heavy clods of snow and ice clung to her beard and her combat boots as she plodded, trying to keep track of her direction. For the past few days since leaving the seclusion of Kestheven she had tried to appear put out and cross at having to share her time with the others. Secretly, though, she was quite enjoying herself. The old fierce pleasure she took in danger was reviving in her. Her only regret was that Iris didn't run an altogether tighter s.h.i.+p. They were carrying on like civilians, like a picnic party. And she felt that the others were falling into the habit of mocking her bl.u.s.ter and effort at control. Especially that Doctor.

Worst of all, though, was the suggestion that the d.u.c.h.ess, fabled member of her own one-time crack fighting team, was actually in the throes of falling in love with an arachnid. The idea turned her purple.

She ploughed on through knee-deep snow, managed to steer a brave and blind course between the ice ziggurats that had been sculpted by the winds.'d.u.c.h.ess?' she bellowed against the noise.'Are you still with us?'

She wanted, perhaps, to give the cyborg a piece of her mind. The idea was rather vague and unformed in her mind, but she did want to say her piece. She felt that somehow the d.u.c.h.ess was letting the side down by getting herself so involved. She needed a timely reminder of what their duties - as soldiers of Hyspero - actually were.

It had been Angela the Bearded Lady who, many years ago, had found the d.u.c.h.ess in the first place. On one of her few forays into further s.p.a.ce she had become embroiled in a strange adventure on a life-sustainable moon. On that jewelled and arid ma.s.s Major Angela had found it necessary to put paid to the machinations of a powerful vizier called Sit al-Husn, who had been busily fas.h.i.+oning an entire race of cyborgs. For raw material he had been using the cannibalised spare parts of a colony of human beings who had crash-landed on his private moon. He rescued and utilised their hearts and minds.What luck for old Sit al-Husn! He had cracked open their s.h.i.+ny colony s.h.i.+p and found salvageable bodies of flesh suspended in gloopy life-giving syrups. The fight with him and his spanking-new cyborgs had been one of the Bearded Lady's earliest adventures, she reflected fondly - when her team had only three members. They had foiled the vizier Sit al-Husn's plans, destroyed his secret base and demobilised his hordes of marauding cyborgs - all apart from the d.u.c.h.ess, who, for reasons of her own, found the conscience to help them to win. Happier days. The team of three had become four and they had banished the vizier to Z-s.p.a.ce, as she remembered, before they returned to Hyspero via his wonky and unreliable interst.i.tial bridge. As far as Angela could make out, that was a kind of transdimensional escalator that had burned holes in her boots and given her a headache that lasted a week. So her fighting squad of bandits had been born.

Oh, and then, about a year later that same vizier had returned to take over all of Hyspero, his strength redoubled and his powers charged by a mysterious scimitar he had found deep in Z-s.p.a.ce and he had come wanting to wrest the throne from the Scarlet Empress. She had called in the four to deal with him again. That time, too, it had been the d.u.c.h.ess who had saved their necks.

So many stories, Major Angela thought.

She stood at the mouth of the ice cave. She could almost feel the darkness within upon her skin. Blindness had made her extra sensitive to certain conditions and presences. Her beard actually bristled to tell her who was nearby.

These days she wasn't used to being out in such open s.p.a.ces. It wasn't good for her to feel exposed or out in the open like this. Angela was used to having her protective bears at her back.

The ice at the mouth of the cave had melted and retreated a little and this sound attracted her - the steady drizzle of cold water. She knew the spider and the cyborg were beyond that curtain of melt water. She could sense the bulked, languorous shape of the spider just back from the mouth of the cave, draped in her netting.

'Dawn is up,' she said into the darkness.'We must be on our way.'